Re: Color independent themes

[Pat Suwalski <pat suwalski net>]

Jason J. Herne wrote:
> Now, I may not understand everything to due with themes, but wouldn't
> it be relatively easy to create themes that allow the user to change the
> color scheme?  The theme author would simply define a set number of
> "colors" (with default RGB values) and name them something like
> "WINDOW_BORDER_GRADIENT_A" and "WINDOW_BORDER_GRADIENT_B" and then if
> you want your window border to fade from blue to blank instead of red to
> black, you would simply edit the RGB values of the colors on a nice GUI
> form, part of the Gnome theme manager.  A side effect of this may be
> that graphics created for themes should be grayscale?  Just some
> thoughts... let me know what you think.  

The problem here (for a GUI) is the sheer variety of capabilities in a 
theme engine. Some might have gradientA->gradientB, some might have 3 or 
more gradients. No generic GUI could handle that.

If you look at Clearlooks as an example, there are three themes with it, 
and they each specify all of the colours that the theme engine itself 
understands.

IIRC, back in the Gnome 1.x days, the theme engine provided the 
interface for setting colours. Maybe going back to something like that 
would make sense?

--Pat